How to Render a Water Orb

With an ounce of creativity and the randomness of Adobe Photoshop filters, all sorts of mysterious, magical, fantastic objects can be rendered. Sometimes, an artist does not even know what he is trying to render when playing around with filters. This is excellent, since the image that the filter eventually creates can serve as a source of inspiration.

Things You'll Need

• Adobe Photoshop

Instructions

Rendering a Water Orb

1. 

   Press D on the keyboard to set the foreground and background color to black and white. Press X so that the foreground color is white. Fill the background with black and apply the stained glass filter. Set the cell size to 50, the border thickness to 1, and the light intensity to 10.

2. 

   Apply the chrome filter with detail at 0 and smoothness at 10.

3. 

   Apply the glowing edges filter with the edge width at 4, the edge brightness at 7 and the smoothness at 5.

4. 

   Apply the glass filter with distortion at 11, smoothness at 5 and texture on "Frosted." Set the scaling at 57 per cent.

5. 

   Apply the radial blur at 100 amount with the blur method at "Zoom" and the quality set to "Good."

6. 

   Apply the gaussian blur set at 2,0.

7. 

   Go to Hue/Saturation, found under Adjustments. Click "Colorize" and set the hue to 326, saturation to 35 and lightness to +9.

8. 

   Duplicate the layer and set the foreground to a blue color and the background to a pink color. Apply the clouds filter.

9. 

   Set the blending mode on the top layer to color dodge. Merge both layers.

10. 

    Apply the filter "Polar coordinates."

11. 

    Adjust hue and saturation until the image is this color.

12. 

    Apply the twirl feature in a positive direction at whatever value you like to create the effect of waves.

13. 

    Duplicate the layer. Apply twirl in a negative direction.

14. 

    Set the blending mode on the top layer to pin light.

Tips & Warnings

• Omit any of the steps if you like some of the earlier results better than the later results.

• Save often in more than one file. The Undo feature only goes back so far.